The parent company of California's Anthem Blue Cross will pay $6 million to settle allegations the company dropped customers after they were diagnosed with major illnesses, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
Following a series of Los Angeles Times reports in 2006, California regulators and litigators accused Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of second-largest health insurer WellPoint, of scouring patients' enrollment applications for errors after the patients were diagnosed with costly illnesses in an attempt to disqualify them from coverage. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act later explicitly forbade denying patients coverage for unintentional application errors.
Blue Shield of California paid a $2 million settlement in 2011 for similar allegations, according to the report.
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